Thursday, September 11, 2003
People don’t come to New York to get by. Oh, sure, that’s what most of us do most of the time, many not even that much. But, that’s not really why anyone’s here. People come to New York to reach the top of their fields, to “make it to the big time”, to succeed, to win.
Well…actually…win isn’t really the right term. Winning and losing calls to mind more of a sports analogy or a zero-sum game where you can only succeed if someone else fails. While the status game in the City is absolutely intense, really, the drive to New York is motivated by far more independent goals. People come here more because they want to reach the top of their game, regardless of what happens with others. I’d say a better metaphor is realizing your dreams. After all, how many of us dream of where we want to be in relation to others?
This wellspring of ambition is, by and large, what drives New York and probably always has. Commerce from being the junction between the Erie Canal and the Atlantic largely built New York, and from there flowed into finance, the arts, publishing, and the rest of the businesses New York is known for. But any of these fields derive the bulk of their value from intellectual capital. And to truly thrive in an intellectual capital intensive business, education isn’t really enough, you need education and drive (within which I am including qualities such as risk tolerance, persistence, and faith in oneself). So, the City has for years imported both the brightest and the most driven that the country and the world, for that matter, has to offer and offered them the prospect of reaching as far as their drive and ambition could propel them. It couldn’t guarantee the pinnacle to anyone, and really didn’t have to. Merely, the prospect of achieving on such a level set forth an engine of talent and effort that turned New York into the metropolis that surpassed the capitols of the Old World in magnificence, achievement, and, yes, culture.
In this sense, the experience of New York City largely mirrors that of the United States as a whole with the rest of the world. One of the prime drivers of American economic success has been its ability to draw from other countries those whose ambition and drive would make living life in the service of the local laird or padrone a waste. Really, whether one believes that immigration was instituted as a form of cheap labor is entirely irrelavent. Far more significant is the almost blistering pace with which these immigrants made good and achieved a level of prosperity that helped to drive America into its position as the world’s pre-eminent economy.
Still, though, people tend to look at ambition with a wary eye. That is, if they don’t outright consider it evil. I’m inclined to think that much of ambition’s reputation comes from the aforementioned zero-sum game analogy: somebody wins and somebody loses. If that were the case ambition could only be realized by causing losses for every one of your gains. And, really, until the last few hundred years, that really was the way things worked. Success, by and large was achieved by conquest. Winning was the domain of the battlefield. In short, a person mostly gained at the point of a sword.
But, the advent of the modern economy began to change that. Slowly, over a couple of centuries, a new idea began to take form: that wealth could be created. This was a revolutionary concept. Since time immemorial, people believed that wealth was something that was fought over or extracted. A new type of person began to appear on the scene, neither peasant, nor noble, nor clerical: the middle class. These people were heretofore unknown in history. They lived through life with no guarantees of the estate, but vastly more enjoying the fruits of their own thought and labor. From the peddler to the artisan to the merchant prince, these individuals made their way in the world by creating value and trading it for value created by others.
Over the generations, the middle class also brought forth a new ethic and a new philosophy, more relevant to a world of producers and exchangers than to masters and servants. Notions such as individual liberty, personal responsibility, and the primacy of reason began to take root as the cornerstones of Western thought. These ideas, while originating outside of the middle class, were largely championed by the middle class, and took their root in our culture as a result of being more applicable to the world the middle class created and lived in.
These notions, as you may have noted, formed much of the basis of the American Revolution. That’s no accident. Despite the academic pretense that the founders were all representatives of the elite (Granted, at least Zinn has the presence of mind to put it to the framers.), they all, to a man, would have been laughed out of the courts of Europe had they tried to mark a place for themselves. From Jefferson’s yeoman farmer to Hamilton’s mercantile elite, we see the basis of this country in a hard-working, tough-minded, middle class outlook.
Nevertheless, there was one area where the middle class never truly addressed the need for revising outlooks to the middle class world. That area is their view of themselves. The middle class can, by and large, be characterized by their both their ambition and their desire for success. Ambition, as noted previously, and the desire for success, are incredibly dangerous things where wealth is obtained by force. When one’s ambition is to create a lot of stuff to sell and one’s desire for success amounts to succeeding in producing a product that will satisfy peoples’ desires, these qualities are beneficient. There is a difference, after all, in success measured in the number bodies on the funeral pyre and success measured in the number of new patents developed.
Actually, the ambition of the middle class, the ambition we all know, carries in it, a number of distinct virtues. Implicitly, this ambition carries in it a belief in the fundamental goodness of life. The desire for improvement in one’s life presupposes the belief that joy is the natural order of things. This is remarkably distinct from the idea earlier notions of the avoidance of pain. Whatsmore, ambition assumes a tremendous degree of both courage and self-reliance. One doesn’t look to a better future unless one believes in one’s soul not only that life is not only meant to be a delight, but in one’s own ability to shape it that way. Finally, ambition carries with it a willingness to cast one’s own judgement and creativity out into the world and go beyond the safe, the tried, and the comfortable. This willingness, and the faith in oneself it implies, has been the driving force behind the advancements and human creative achievements throughout history.
Nevertheless, the biblical proscription against self-aggrandizement led to a widespread distrust or even condemnation of both ambition and the ambitious. Left unsaid is the fact that the biblical condemnation stemmed from a world where ambition was realized, as I said, in conquest and battle. A great deal of the condemnation of ambition, stems from the idea of wealth and success as a zero-sum game. But that’s not really the case. Actually, much the opposite is true. Its often easier to succeed in the presence of the successful and lacking a network of equally talented peers often serves as an impediment to realizing one’s goals. This reality has been crucial in the New York success story. Consider the case of an actor. The best actor in Cleveland, Baltimore, or Spokane is…well…the best actor in Cleveland, Baltimore, or Spokane. This is not to denigrate their innate talents. The reality is that the pieces they’re performing are likely to be rehashes of what played on Broadway two years ago, their director is less likely to be of the caliber they can find in New York, and the actors they’re working with aren’t likely to have the wherewithal to bring out their best work. Much the same is true in the financial world. It’s access to a sophisticated, market that allows for the utilization of advanced financial techniques. Selling or developing derivatives or structured product strategies is possible in New York in a way that would be laughable in Butte, Montana or Casper, Wyoming. The reason is that there are enough professionals whose knowledge base and talents are developed enough to analyze and understand these products in New York to make the market a reality. Even journalism, no doubt, benefits from this collection of talent. I’m sure even a staff writer for the New York Times or the Village Voice can get access to a story more easily than a writer for the Des Moines Resister or Philadelphia Weekly. The papers have a reputation (not necessarily well-deserved) for accuracy and covering a story intelligently. That, in turn, makes them a better outlet for sources to break a story. The list is nearly endless. Suffice it to say that success is, for the most part, a positive-sum game.
Still, ambition gets frowned upon and the ambitious get denigrated as fortune-hunters, adventurers, or just plain greedy when they seek out their fortunes over the horizon by those who prefer the safety of the proven and established. (My own great grandfather was cursed by his mother when brought his brother over to America from the family farm in Italy.) Damned or not, they continue on in their ambition. With the advent of the American nation, they flocked to the new country with its basis in the middle class outlook and to New York, the city that most strongly embodied the new nation’s ethos, in particular. While America paid lip service to the distrust of ambition, by and large, the nation generally encouraged the quality and was far more comfortable with it than any society had ever been before. New York, the city of Ragged Dick, on the other hand, embraced ambition wholeheartedly and made ambition a way of life.
The City’s intense ambition, and its access to Old World capital centers, quickly propelled it to become the Republic’s financial center. And the boundless energy of an ambitious republic settling a continent and establishing the large-scale enterprises that the middle class outlook had made possible proved a ready market. Through American history, the ambitions of the New York financial community not only provided the stuff of legend and infamy, but proved ingenious at finding ever more vehicles for providing capital where it was needed and managing the risk that that capital was exposed to. New York, the nation’s money center, became the showpiece of a people whose ambition and enthusiasm were unsurpassed by any other.
The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center really didn’t have all that much to recommend them, esthetically. The International Style in which they were built was largely drab, cold, and soulless. The look of most buildings in the International Style can be basically summarized as big boxes of hard stuff. Far more inspiring buildings like the Woolworth or, my personal favorite, the Art Deco Chrysler Building really had a lot more going for them. And, really, a lot of the design of the place, the indoor casuseways, for instance, could at times give the place a monolithic, impersonal feeling. The only thing that the towers really had going for them was their sheer height.
But that sheer height made up for a lot, especially when one considers that they were working office buildings. The fact that they towered over perhaps the most awesome skyline history has ever known made them a wonder of the modern world. Unlike other wonders of the world, the towers weren’t intended as a place of worship or a crypt. They were a place of business, a place where men and women lived their lives creating weealth. And their size seemed to say something. It seemed that the towers reached out to the heavens above – not in praise or in begging for mercy but in accepting their due. They spoke of ambition.
By and large, they housed financial firms: banks, brokerages, and the high-end consulting firms such organizations rely on to make their businesses competitive. The people in the building had come from all over the world, to America – to New York – to make good on their ambitions of joining the lineage of the New York financial world. Even at 3 AM, passing through the Trade Center, one could expect to find the place alive with activity. The New York financial world that called the towers home rested (and rests today) on ambition and drive such as this. Beyond talent and intelligence, the work in the towers was inexorably bound in the drive that is the New York story.
On the first anniversary of 9/11, a columnist made a comparison of the Al Quaeda attack to Jesus of Nazareth’s chasing the moneychangers from the temple. At the time, I was outraged. The towers weren’t, after all, a temple and the work of those in the towers wasn’t a defilement of the sacred. But, really, the towers were a temple…well…a monument, really. This reality, however, makes the comparison still more outrageous. The Trade Center was served, in both form and function, as an unacknowledged monument to the ambition and drive that makes America the world’s preeminent nation and New York the exemplification of that success.
In that sense, the towers were unique. Drive and ambition, as I’ve noted, aren’t really values that people particularly care to pay tribute to. They were by no means the best possible expression of these qualities, but they expressed and honored virtues that are all too often disparaged or treated as a shameful secret. For many of us, the desire to see these qualities again paid tribute to underlies the desire to see the towers reconstructed on at least their original scale. This consideration belies many of the critiques I’ve heard voiced of the idea from various cultural elites. For me, at least, this desire is not about hubris, not about weanie whacking, not about proving something. Its about preserving the statement about America and about New York that deserves recognition.
While rebuilding the site with smaller, more modest, buildings would undoubtedly be preferable from a safety and security perspective, its difficult to see where smaller buildings could continue to honor ambition and drive in a meaningful way. The diminished scale would seem to say “Try hard to get ahead, but don’t be crass about it.” Likewise, I understand the feelings of many who lost loved ones at the site on 9/11 that the land is hallowed ground and rebuilding anything there would dishonor their loss and suffering. Still, though, leaving the ground with nothing there but a monument to the victims of 9/11 would provide even worse symbolism. To replace a monument to ambition and achievement with a monument to pain and suffering is to deny the former. It is to say that ambition and achievement are failures that the true state of the world was the world we saw and that tragic September morning.
Also unsatisfying were the proposals that the site of the World Trade Center be used to house civic amenities, like community centers, arts centers, schools, parks, and libraries. While cost made this approach completely non-viable from the start, the idea, if it had caught on, would have equally have betrayed the values the towers embodied. The ambition and drive that the Trade Center embodied would have been trapped in the safe, cozy, cocoon that ambition has always been driven to move beyond. A place where men and women struggled and labored to remake the world for greater advantage would be replaced with field trips, day care, and pottery displays.
A great many proposals for the design of a skyscraper at the Trade Center site were put forward in addition to those considered by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. (LMDC). Some of the proposals actually outshone the ideas selected by the LMDC. Other proposals, on the other hand, had a scale matched with a seemingly intentional absurdity to them that seemed to recognize the place of ambition in the Trade Center, but to recognize it with a sneer, as if the designers wished their creation an insult to the notion.
I think that a great many people had the sort of vague unidentified feeling that I had of the towers as a monument to drive and ambition. I think the fact that our larger society never really embraced ambition, despite the Americans’ tremendously ambitious nature, left the ambitions of City and the World Trade Center largely left unsaid. But that absence of acknowledgement didn’t make the underlying ambiguity in our feelings about ambition go away. Even in New York, many people still view ambition with suspicion or at best distaste. I think that, as a result, many would like to see the replacement for the towers play down or remove the sense of ambitiousness that characterized its earlier incarnation. I don’t think it’s a conscious, intentional, desire, but more of a blind eye to the virtues the towers embodied and a consequent willingness to replace those advantages with others that they can more easily relate to.
To be honest, I’m not really sure of what I think of the Libeskind design, the design that actually won the competition to replace the Twin Towers. At this point, despite having seen the plans for the building a number of times, I still don’t really have a strong sense of what the finished building is going to actually look like. Skyscrapers with slanted roofs always struck me as a little self satisfied, yet the spire to the tower might prove enough for the new building to again serve as a tribute to the ambitious work that will be taking place within its confines. Still, the LMDC has indicated that the design is only a basis and changes in the design can be expected. If so, I hope the LMDC keeps in mind the spirit that drove New York to preeminence in America and America to preeminence in the world.
Well…actually…win isn’t really the right term. Winning and losing calls to mind more of a sports analogy or a zero-sum game where you can only succeed if someone else fails. While the status game in the City is absolutely intense, really, the drive to New York is motivated by far more independent goals. People come here more because they want to reach the top of their game, regardless of what happens with others. I’d say a better metaphor is realizing your dreams. After all, how many of us dream of where we want to be in relation to others?
This wellspring of ambition is, by and large, what drives New York and probably always has. Commerce from being the junction between the Erie Canal and the Atlantic largely built New York, and from there flowed into finance, the arts, publishing, and the rest of the businesses New York is known for. But any of these fields derive the bulk of their value from intellectual capital. And to truly thrive in an intellectual capital intensive business, education isn’t really enough, you need education and drive (within which I am including qualities such as risk tolerance, persistence, and faith in oneself). So, the City has for years imported both the brightest and the most driven that the country and the world, for that matter, has to offer and offered them the prospect of reaching as far as their drive and ambition could propel them. It couldn’t guarantee the pinnacle to anyone, and really didn’t have to. Merely, the prospect of achieving on such a level set forth an engine of talent and effort that turned New York into the metropolis that surpassed the capitols of the Old World in magnificence, achievement, and, yes, culture.
In this sense, the experience of New York City largely mirrors that of the United States as a whole with the rest of the world. One of the prime drivers of American economic success has been its ability to draw from other countries those whose ambition and drive would make living life in the service of the local laird or padrone a waste. Really, whether one believes that immigration was instituted as a form of cheap labor is entirely irrelavent. Far more significant is the almost blistering pace with which these immigrants made good and achieved a level of prosperity that helped to drive America into its position as the world’s pre-eminent economy.
Still, though, people tend to look at ambition with a wary eye. That is, if they don’t outright consider it evil. I’m inclined to think that much of ambition’s reputation comes from the aforementioned zero-sum game analogy: somebody wins and somebody loses. If that were the case ambition could only be realized by causing losses for every one of your gains. And, really, until the last few hundred years, that really was the way things worked. Success, by and large was achieved by conquest. Winning was the domain of the battlefield. In short, a person mostly gained at the point of a sword.
But, the advent of the modern economy began to change that. Slowly, over a couple of centuries, a new idea began to take form: that wealth could be created. This was a revolutionary concept. Since time immemorial, people believed that wealth was something that was fought over or extracted. A new type of person began to appear on the scene, neither peasant, nor noble, nor clerical: the middle class. These people were heretofore unknown in history. They lived through life with no guarantees of the estate, but vastly more enjoying the fruits of their own thought and labor. From the peddler to the artisan to the merchant prince, these individuals made their way in the world by creating value and trading it for value created by others.
Over the generations, the middle class also brought forth a new ethic and a new philosophy, more relevant to a world of producers and exchangers than to masters and servants. Notions such as individual liberty, personal responsibility, and the primacy of reason began to take root as the cornerstones of Western thought. These ideas, while originating outside of the middle class, were largely championed by the middle class, and took their root in our culture as a result of being more applicable to the world the middle class created and lived in.
These notions, as you may have noted, formed much of the basis of the American Revolution. That’s no accident. Despite the academic pretense that the founders were all representatives of the elite (Granted, at least Zinn has the presence of mind to put it to the framers.), they all, to a man, would have been laughed out of the courts of Europe had they tried to mark a place for themselves. From Jefferson’s yeoman farmer to Hamilton’s mercantile elite, we see the basis of this country in a hard-working, tough-minded, middle class outlook.
Nevertheless, there was one area where the middle class never truly addressed the need for revising outlooks to the middle class world. That area is their view of themselves. The middle class can, by and large, be characterized by their both their ambition and their desire for success. Ambition, as noted previously, and the desire for success, are incredibly dangerous things where wealth is obtained by force. When one’s ambition is to create a lot of stuff to sell and one’s desire for success amounts to succeeding in producing a product that will satisfy peoples’ desires, these qualities are beneficient. There is a difference, after all, in success measured in the number bodies on the funeral pyre and success measured in the number of new patents developed.
Actually, the ambition of the middle class, the ambition we all know, carries in it, a number of distinct virtues. Implicitly, this ambition carries in it a belief in the fundamental goodness of life. The desire for improvement in one’s life presupposes the belief that joy is the natural order of things. This is remarkably distinct from the idea earlier notions of the avoidance of pain. Whatsmore, ambition assumes a tremendous degree of both courage and self-reliance. One doesn’t look to a better future unless one believes in one’s soul not only that life is not only meant to be a delight, but in one’s own ability to shape it that way. Finally, ambition carries with it a willingness to cast one’s own judgement and creativity out into the world and go beyond the safe, the tried, and the comfortable. This willingness, and the faith in oneself it implies, has been the driving force behind the advancements and human creative achievements throughout history.
Nevertheless, the biblical proscription against self-aggrandizement led to a widespread distrust or even condemnation of both ambition and the ambitious. Left unsaid is the fact that the biblical condemnation stemmed from a world where ambition was realized, as I said, in conquest and battle. A great deal of the condemnation of ambition, stems from the idea of wealth and success as a zero-sum game. But that’s not really the case. Actually, much the opposite is true. Its often easier to succeed in the presence of the successful and lacking a network of equally talented peers often serves as an impediment to realizing one’s goals. This reality has been crucial in the New York success story. Consider the case of an actor. The best actor in Cleveland, Baltimore, or Spokane is…well…the best actor in Cleveland, Baltimore, or Spokane. This is not to denigrate their innate talents. The reality is that the pieces they’re performing are likely to be rehashes of what played on Broadway two years ago, their director is less likely to be of the caliber they can find in New York, and the actors they’re working with aren’t likely to have the wherewithal to bring out their best work. Much the same is true in the financial world. It’s access to a sophisticated, market that allows for the utilization of advanced financial techniques. Selling or developing derivatives or structured product strategies is possible in New York in a way that would be laughable in Butte, Montana or Casper, Wyoming. The reason is that there are enough professionals whose knowledge base and talents are developed enough to analyze and understand these products in New York to make the market a reality. Even journalism, no doubt, benefits from this collection of talent. I’m sure even a staff writer for the New York Times or the Village Voice can get access to a story more easily than a writer for the Des Moines Resister or Philadelphia Weekly. The papers have a reputation (not necessarily well-deserved) for accuracy and covering a story intelligently. That, in turn, makes them a better outlet for sources to break a story. The list is nearly endless. Suffice it to say that success is, for the most part, a positive-sum game.
Still, ambition gets frowned upon and the ambitious get denigrated as fortune-hunters, adventurers, or just plain greedy when they seek out their fortunes over the horizon by those who prefer the safety of the proven and established. (My own great grandfather was cursed by his mother when brought his brother over to America from the family farm in Italy.) Damned or not, they continue on in their ambition. With the advent of the American nation, they flocked to the new country with its basis in the middle class outlook and to New York, the city that most strongly embodied the new nation’s ethos, in particular. While America paid lip service to the distrust of ambition, by and large, the nation generally encouraged the quality and was far more comfortable with it than any society had ever been before. New York, the city of Ragged Dick, on the other hand, embraced ambition wholeheartedly and made ambition a way of life.
The City’s intense ambition, and its access to Old World capital centers, quickly propelled it to become the Republic’s financial center. And the boundless energy of an ambitious republic settling a continent and establishing the large-scale enterprises that the middle class outlook had made possible proved a ready market. Through American history, the ambitions of the New York financial community not only provided the stuff of legend and infamy, but proved ingenious at finding ever more vehicles for providing capital where it was needed and managing the risk that that capital was exposed to. New York, the nation’s money center, became the showpiece of a people whose ambition and enthusiasm were unsurpassed by any other.
The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center really didn’t have all that much to recommend them, esthetically. The International Style in which they were built was largely drab, cold, and soulless. The look of most buildings in the International Style can be basically summarized as big boxes of hard stuff. Far more inspiring buildings like the Woolworth or, my personal favorite, the Art Deco Chrysler Building really had a lot more going for them. And, really, a lot of the design of the place, the indoor casuseways, for instance, could at times give the place a monolithic, impersonal feeling. The only thing that the towers really had going for them was their sheer height.
But that sheer height made up for a lot, especially when one considers that they were working office buildings. The fact that they towered over perhaps the most awesome skyline history has ever known made them a wonder of the modern world. Unlike other wonders of the world, the towers weren’t intended as a place of worship or a crypt. They were a place of business, a place where men and women lived their lives creating weealth. And their size seemed to say something. It seemed that the towers reached out to the heavens above – not in praise or in begging for mercy but in accepting their due. They spoke of ambition.
By and large, they housed financial firms: banks, brokerages, and the high-end consulting firms such organizations rely on to make their businesses competitive. The people in the building had come from all over the world, to America – to New York – to make good on their ambitions of joining the lineage of the New York financial world. Even at 3 AM, passing through the Trade Center, one could expect to find the place alive with activity. The New York financial world that called the towers home rested (and rests today) on ambition and drive such as this. Beyond talent and intelligence, the work in the towers was inexorably bound in the drive that is the New York story.
On the first anniversary of 9/11, a columnist made a comparison of the Al Quaeda attack to Jesus of Nazareth’s chasing the moneychangers from the temple. At the time, I was outraged. The towers weren’t, after all, a temple and the work of those in the towers wasn’t a defilement of the sacred. But, really, the towers were a temple…well…a monument, really. This reality, however, makes the comparison still more outrageous. The Trade Center was served, in both form and function, as an unacknowledged monument to the ambition and drive that makes America the world’s preeminent nation and New York the exemplification of that success.
In that sense, the towers were unique. Drive and ambition, as I’ve noted, aren’t really values that people particularly care to pay tribute to. They were by no means the best possible expression of these qualities, but they expressed and honored virtues that are all too often disparaged or treated as a shameful secret. For many of us, the desire to see these qualities again paid tribute to underlies the desire to see the towers reconstructed on at least their original scale. This consideration belies many of the critiques I’ve heard voiced of the idea from various cultural elites. For me, at least, this desire is not about hubris, not about weanie whacking, not about proving something. Its about preserving the statement about America and about New York that deserves recognition.
While rebuilding the site with smaller, more modest, buildings would undoubtedly be preferable from a safety and security perspective, its difficult to see where smaller buildings could continue to honor ambition and drive in a meaningful way. The diminished scale would seem to say “Try hard to get ahead, but don’t be crass about it.” Likewise, I understand the feelings of many who lost loved ones at the site on 9/11 that the land is hallowed ground and rebuilding anything there would dishonor their loss and suffering. Still, though, leaving the ground with nothing there but a monument to the victims of 9/11 would provide even worse symbolism. To replace a monument to ambition and achievement with a monument to pain and suffering is to deny the former. It is to say that ambition and achievement are failures that the true state of the world was the world we saw and that tragic September morning.
Also unsatisfying were the proposals that the site of the World Trade Center be used to house civic amenities, like community centers, arts centers, schools, parks, and libraries. While cost made this approach completely non-viable from the start, the idea, if it had caught on, would have equally have betrayed the values the towers embodied. The ambition and drive that the Trade Center embodied would have been trapped in the safe, cozy, cocoon that ambition has always been driven to move beyond. A place where men and women struggled and labored to remake the world for greater advantage would be replaced with field trips, day care, and pottery displays.
A great many proposals for the design of a skyscraper at the Trade Center site were put forward in addition to those considered by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. (LMDC). Some of the proposals actually outshone the ideas selected by the LMDC. Other proposals, on the other hand, had a scale matched with a seemingly intentional absurdity to them that seemed to recognize the place of ambition in the Trade Center, but to recognize it with a sneer, as if the designers wished their creation an insult to the notion.
I think that a great many people had the sort of vague unidentified feeling that I had of the towers as a monument to drive and ambition. I think the fact that our larger society never really embraced ambition, despite the Americans’ tremendously ambitious nature, left the ambitions of City and the World Trade Center largely left unsaid. But that absence of acknowledgement didn’t make the underlying ambiguity in our feelings about ambition go away. Even in New York, many people still view ambition with suspicion or at best distaste. I think that, as a result, many would like to see the replacement for the towers play down or remove the sense of ambitiousness that characterized its earlier incarnation. I don’t think it’s a conscious, intentional, desire, but more of a blind eye to the virtues the towers embodied and a consequent willingness to replace those advantages with others that they can more easily relate to.
To be honest, I’m not really sure of what I think of the Libeskind design, the design that actually won the competition to replace the Twin Towers. At this point, despite having seen the plans for the building a number of times, I still don’t really have a strong sense of what the finished building is going to actually look like. Skyscrapers with slanted roofs always struck me as a little self satisfied, yet the spire to the tower might prove enough for the new building to again serve as a tribute to the ambitious work that will be taking place within its confines. Still, the LMDC has indicated that the design is only a basis and changes in the design can be expected. If so, I hope the LMDC keeps in mind the spirit that drove New York to preeminence in America and America to preeminence in the world.
